


Plastid

by SpiralSpace



Series: Rok's Duty [2]
Category: Warframe
Genre: Brave and Loyal Grineer will be put in the Rok Tumbler to Atone for their Crimes, Clumsily Projected Self Hatred, Dismemberment, Gen, Gore, Infestation, self hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 04:06:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17480849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiralSpace/pseuds/SpiralSpace
Summary: You ever just have one of those days? Me neither.





	Plastid

The lancer screamed as it bit deep into his arm. Enforcement Lieutenant Rok grabbed the thing, trying to pull it away from the hapless grineer. He saw something vaguely skull-shaped embedded in the repulsive mass of charnel that made up the beast’s underbelly, and kicked out. It shuddered, and unclamped its jaws to howl. He kicked again, heard something shatter against the steel toe of his boot, and it went limp.

He let the corpse fall to the ground with a wet thud, and fished through his rigging for a plasma sheev. “Arm,” he said to the wounded lancer, who reluctantly held out the wounded limb. Rok grabbed it, and struck immediately with his knife, cleanly severing and cauterizing just above the elbow, and above the already festering wound. The other grineer gritted his teeth, but said nothing.

Rok had been transferred from Earth Five rail to Saturn Seven just recently, that very shift-cycle in fact. Technically Enforcement Leader to Enforcement Lieutenant could be thought of as a demotion, but Saturn Seven was a much larger and more important station. He’d been excited, actually. His new superior had been giving him the tour when the Infested had appeared. The Enforcement Leader got hit by a detonating bioform before any of them even knew they were there, and that was before the lights cut out. They’d been lucky there’d only been three of those things.

But there shouldn’t have been any of them. He’d heard about the Infested, but they preyed on weak and vulnerable ships. He’d never heard of them attacking a station before, and only very rarely of them targeting the Grineer. But he’d seen what they could do, in the halls of the empty derelicts that had drifted into his old post from time to time. If they were inside… things were only going to get uglier. He couldn’t hold a room with four lancers, especially just enforcement lancers armed with grakatas. They were trained to run customs and border security, not fight monsters. Most grineer didn’t even think of them as military. If he tried to make a stand, they’d attract the attention of something larger and uglier and be bowled over like pins. But where could they go? He had no reason to believe anywhere else on the station was faring any better…

But there was the inspection. Yes, the enforcement leader had mentioned that there was a subcommander here for an inspection. Their galleon was docked at port B. A sealed military vessel full of actual, heavily armed marines? There was nowhere safer to be. When he was younger, Rok wished he’d been chosen to be one of them, to taste real battle and real glory as frequently as they did. Now he found himself more frequently resenting them, their pride and their callousness. At a guess, the marines were probably just sitting around in there, laughing at the enforcement teams getting butchered on the security feed and waiting for orders from higher up before they got off their cloned rears. Which meant it was on him to get his team over there.

Rok looked around. Unfamilar room, and four unfamiliar, sullen faces of the enforcement lancers nervously checking the corners and entryways for further movement, lit up by his flashlight. He didn’t know any of their names, but their commanding officer was a slurry on the floor. He could feel them waiting for him to do something. “WHAT ARE YOU STANDING AROUND FOR?!” he yelled. They stared at him blankly. “The station’s been breached, we needed to be moving yesterday! There’s a ship at docking port B that’ll get us off this coffin, so don’t stop running even if you hear the queens themselves telling you to!” The one armed lancer from earlier caught his eye. The grineer soldier looked pale, and his gaze was unfocused. It wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest if he was in shock, even grineer weren’t that tough. 

Rok had seen shock many times over the years, in many forms. Something about this didn’t seem like shock. His eyes narrowed. “Especially you.”

-

He’d never been on Saturn Seven before, but fortunately station designers were pretty uniformly uncreative across the Grineer empire, so he was confident of his direction as he charged down the hallway. Then his flashlight caught something. Infested macrospores drifting in the air, glinting orange like embers from a fire under his illumination. He skidded to a halt.

The average marine’s armour came with a helmet whose filter was, if properly maintained, mostly capable of handling the hazardous particles associated with an infested outbreak. An enforcement marine’s kit contained no such thing, on account of the infrequency of serious combat encounters of any kind and a perceived decrease in the effectiveness of intimidating yelling while wearing one. He held up his hand. To their credit, his new team stopped neatly behind him. He scanned the room. Signs of battle were everywhere. Grineer and infested viscera had been splattered across the walls and floor, and were already blackened with the tiny sporing growths that had poisoned the air.

But no bodies to be seen. That meant the infested had won this fight. His gut had been right, the station was already dying. “Don’t breathe,” he said, and broke into a sprint again.

-

They encountered several more spore coated battle scenes on their way to docking port B, but, perhaps because of this, their path was otherwise clear. He was panting as they passed through the final bulkhead into the loading bay, and turned to his left to see the massive closed airlock of the docking port. He ordered the others to hold position, and approached the door. The first one opened easily to his accesses. As it slid silently open and he approached the second console he saw what he had been dreading. The galleon-side airlock hatch had been sealed under an emergency protocol, because why wouldn’t it be? Why would they give a ferrite slug what happened to five enforcement team members in the middle of a deep space apocalypse.

They’d come so close! He banged his fist on the screen.

“Input not accepted. This console will remain locked for twenty minutes.”

Wait, twenty minutes? He checked again. The emergency lock had been set with a timed expiry. That was almost certainly an accident, but it gave him an opening, and more importantly he would have it whether or not the crew wanted him to. He turned around. 

“Good news and bad news. Good news is that I can get this door open. Bad news is it’ll take twenty minutes. But as long as we…” he stopped. There were only three lancers. One had strayed back the way they came. And no prize for guessing which one. His eyes were focused now, though not on anything Rok could see. He slowly wandered back through the open bulkhead. Rok yelled after him. “You there, lancer!” but the grineer didn’t even turn.

That was that, then. His gut was two for two today, regrettably. The infection had taken hold, and there was only one thing left to do. He raised his hind rifle, and then the infested charger rounded the corner. It was closing fast, a trooper’s plate armour draped over its form like a half discarded skin. The lancer just kept walking forward, eyes fixed on his impending demise. Rok lunged for the door controls. He heard the slam of the bulkhead sealing, and then shortly thereafter the sickening crunch of snapping bone and tearing flesh began. There wasn’t even a scream.

Then, pounding against the door.

He turned to his remaining lancers. “That’s probably not going to hold for nineteen minutes.”

“For the Queens!” One of them yelled. The others immediately joined in the cry, brandishing their weapons and forming up around the door.

It was at that moment that Rok realized he wasn’t scared, not even a little. The tiny animal gnawing at his stomach lining seemed to be anger. 

To succumb to the Infestation was the worst fate imaginable. Even if they avoided being repurposed, forced to fight their own siblings, dying to the infested was no ordinary death. It was the birthright of every grineer from the mightiest general to the lowliest labourer to be mulched when their day and hour came, to become the next generation. But the tainted bodies of his lancers would be denied even that. Why couldn’t they see that the Queens wouldn’t gain from them throwing their existences away? How could they want to die ???

“AAAAAAAAAARGH!” he yelled. They turned to look at him. “No! None of that! Do you think you’re soldiers??? You’re not! You’re nothing!”

He paced, rubbing his forehead, his speech punctuated still by the pounding of monster on metal.

“We’re just customs officials, and we can’t fight these things, so we’re going to hide until that -big door- over there unlocks.” There was a maintenance sideroom between the door and the airlock. The closets weren’t large enough to hide in, but there were enough crannies and recesses that he was still a decent hiding place. He herded the reluctant lancers into an alcove behind a storage rack.

This put their backs to the hallway their comrade had been taken in. They heard, and felt, as the thumping continued, and as more creatures piled on. Rok couldn’t help but notice the rising nerves of his small party. This one’s eyes were darting about, that one was fingering his sidearm compulsively. And a scared grineer…

Rok didn’t like that one bit. “Hand over your ammunition,” he said, as commandingly as he could in a whisper. They looked at him, dumbfounded. “You heard me. Ammo. Now.”

Once their grakatas were unloaded, he had everyone turn off their flashlights. There was nothing left to do but listen to the infestation try to breach the door.

-

First came the thuds of the massive creature’s footfalls. Then the resounding clang of the door being punched in. Then a chorus of almost-human screams and a wave of charnel stench as the horde was set forth, only for the sound and smell to fade again as they rushed off along the curve of the station, in search of more prey.

He was about to breathe a sigh of relief. But it caught in his throat as an infested figure stumbled through the door, illuminated by its own grim bioluminescence. It lurched and shuddered, unfamiliar with walking. Wearing a lancer’s armour, but its knees bent backwards. Thick cords of binding mycelium marked the point where it had been ripped in half and stitched itself back together the wrong way, and most of its right arm was an amorphous, unfinished mass of bare growth. It scanned the room, its knowing, glowing eyes vainly scanning the darkness. Now it was Rok’s turn to resist the reflex to go for his rifle. For a moment it seemed like the thing would step forward and investigate further, but in the end it grew bored and wandered off after the fading sounds of its kin. 

-

None of them moved for a long time. When they did, there was some apprehension in approaching the airlock. But they needn’t have worried; Rok input his accesses and this time it slid open quietly. He let himself slump against the lip of the hatch in elation.

“Take another step and I promise, I will shoot you!”

On the other side of the door was a platoon of grineer marines, arranged behind portable cover in a defensive perimeter. At the centre of their half circle was the leader, a nine-foot gunner wielding a gorgon minigun about as long as Rok was tall. And pointing it directly at his team. “Now,” she said coldly, “why don’t you tell me why you’re breaking into my ship.”

He feigned a casual posture. “Ah, Subcommander Alakka! I am Enforcement Lieutenant Rok. And while it is an honour I must clarify that it is fully within my rights to enter any ship that is being held in customs. Also the door was unsealed.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It was,” he replied. She shot a withering glare at the marine to her right, presumably her subordinate. He wilted in place.

“And as for my purpose here, I’ll just be performing a routine inspection, nothing to be up in arms about.”

“Are, are you DENSE?!?! The station’s suffering a catastrophic biohazardous event! The whole place is swarming with the Infestation, you null-headed waste!”

“All the more reason to get you cleared for launch as soon as possible,” he said, and stepped into the galleon.

Alakka pulled the trigger. A spray of bullets impaced the wall, directly above his head. “WHAT DID I JUST SAY?!” she yelled.

Rok held his hands up placatingly. “Look,” he said, his tone more deferential, “after this is all over, the brass is going to be looking for someone to blame. And I’m pretty certain that I’m the only ranking staff member left on the station who isn’t dead or turned. So if the inquiry starts and I’m already mulched… well, then there’s really only one place left for responsibility to fall, right? Think about it, is it really in your best interest to shoot me?”

The subcommander was about to reply when the ship’s surgeon stormed into the room, her metal talons clanking heavily on the ship’s deck. “What the tubes is going on here?” her voicebox squawked. “Are we waiting for the infested to mosey on in? Get that door closed!” she said, pointing a cybernetic digit at a random grineer. Then she shot a look at the four newcomers. “You, quarantine, now!”

Rok shrugged at Alakka. “Doctor’s orders,” he muttered, walking past her.

-

Two of them had untreatable lung infections from spore exposure, and never left the medical bay. At least their deaths were relatively painless. Rok personally only had irritation, and he and the remaining lancer were out in less than a shift-cycle. That was the one good thing about the infestation; it wasn’t subtle, or even insidious for that matter. It got you or it didn’t.

All of that, then, and one of them had survived. He’d saved a life! Rok was glad. Certainly it was more than he had expected. The remainder of the squad, he and that last lancer, found themselves displaced into the marines’ barracks. Those same marines who were currently out cleansing the station, having finally received orders from high enough up to get them risking their hides on the endeavor. It didn’t take him long to find the loose panel they hid their fermenting protein slurry behind (every grunt always thought they were the first one to think of it), so he poured some for himself and the survivor. The two of them celebrated long into the night, toasting the lives of comrades whose names he’d never had the chance to learn.

-

In the end, it was the deceased Enforcement Leader who took the fall. He was court-martialed for treasonously refusing an order to evacuate, and posthumously stripped of rank. Never mind that Rok had been with him the whole day and no such order had been given. Rok really didn’t mind, actually. Everyone knew blaming the dead guy was just High Command’s way of saying it hadn’t been anyone’s fault. 

Rok himself was promoted in the disgraced Leader’s place, to his surprise. “For valour,” they simply told him. He knew it was strictly a pragmatic decision, though. With a power vacuum that vast, they didn’t care if a coward was filling the seat.

**Author's Note:**

> Rok's getting fast tracked to management, not that he's noticed.
> 
> The last lancer's name is Atam.


End file.
